Welcome to the daily crypto news :

• Bitmain Launches ‘World’s Largest’ Bitcoin Mining Facility in Texas;

• Libra Could Drop ‘Basket’ and Issue Individual Fiat Stablecoins;

• Minister Says India, Like Other Nations, Extremely Cautious on Libra;

• It’s Not Time to Write Libra’s Crypto Obituary Just Yet;

• Researchers Uncover Bitcoin ‘Attack’ That Could Slow or Stop Lightning Payments;

Bitmain Launches ‘World’s Largest’ Bitcoin Mining Facility in Texas

Chinese cryptocurrency hardware manufacturer Bitmain has opened what it claims is the “world’s largest” facility for Bitcoin (BTC) mining in Rockdale, Texas.

In a news release published on Oct. 21, Bitmain revealed the project had been completed together with the Rockdale Municipal Development District and Canadian technology firm DMG Blockchain Solutions.

Pledges to boost the local economy

The news release places a strong emphasis on working with the local economy of Rockdale, which is located in Milam County, east of Austin.

The facility — currently developed to a current 25MW capacity, with a 50MW facility remaining under construction — sits on a 33,000-acre site and can expand to a capacity of over 300MW in the future.

The site is reportedly owned by the Aluminum Company of America, Alcoa, and formerly served as the location for a smelter.

DMG, which is to provide hosting and management services for the Texas facility, will cooperate with Bitmain to expand the facility’s capacity and ensure the efficiency of the site’s mining operations.

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Libra Could Drop ‘Basket’ and Issue Individual Fiat Stablecoins

The Facebook-led Libra project may consider a fundamental change to the way its planned global payments system will operate, according to its chief.

Speaking at a banking seminar, according to a Reuters report on Sunday, co-creator of Libra David Marcus said that the firm could consider dropping the currently planned “synthetic” stablecoin – which is to be pegged to a basket of fiat currencies and government bonds – and instead issue a number of individual coins pegged to national fiat currencies such as the dollar, pound and euro.

He told the panel:

“We could definitely approach this with having a multitude of stablecoins that represent national currencies in a tokenized digital form. That is one of the options that should be considered.”

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Minister Says India, Like Other Nations, Extremely Cautious on Libra

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that India — like many others, in his view — is showing a high degree of caution in regard to Facebook’s Libra.

During last week’s 2019 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, D.C. — which included a discussion of the Libra project — Sitharaman told reporters from the New Indian Express that:

“On our side, the Reserve Bank Governor spoke about it during our turn to intervene. I got the sense that many countries were cautioning on rushing into this [...]. Countries will have to show extreme caution much before anything is said or moved on this.”

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It’s Not Time to Write Libra’s Crypto Obituary Just Yet

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the nation-state’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

The exits of Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and four other firms from the Libra consortium came after France and Germany moved to block the global “stablecoin” cryptocurrency project and after U.S. lawmakers delivered stern warnings to Libra members. This was more than a major setback for Libra founder Facebook; it was also a reminder that government power remains unrivaled. Ten years into the bitcoin revolution, it remains extremely difficult to challenge the state’s monopoly over money.

Yet Libra obituaries are way too premature. The Libra Association still got 21 of its original 28 member entities to sign onto the currency-management consortium in Geneva last week. And even if Libra doesn’t survive, other, less controversial players than Facebook are hatching their own stablecoin plans. If those fail, well, we’ll always have bitcoin.

That said, regulatory resistance is formidable. Last week, both the Financial Action Task Force and the Bank of International Settlements, pronounced that stablecoins such as Libra pose a major threat to anti-money laundering (AML) efforts, financial stability and monetary competition. Meanwhile, some experts, including former Commodities and Futures Trading Commission chief Gary Gensler, have argued that Libra should be regulated as a security.

But none of that means stablecoins aren’t destined for big things. The technology’s ongoing momentum, coupled with geopolitical and global economic imperatives, suggests governments will ultimately have to embrace them or compete with them. As Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Rob Kaplan said last week, sooner or later “somebody’s going to figure out how to do this.”

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Researchers Uncover Bitcoin ‘Attack’ That Could Slow or Stop Lightning Payments

The bitcoin lightning network could be vulnerable to a simple and disruptive attack, according to a recent research paper.

Written by Saar Tochner, Aviv Zohar, and Stefan Schmid, the paper describes a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that could be used to slow down or even stop a huge percentage of payments on the network and, although the behavior hasn’t been seen in the wild and lightning’s technology is still in-progress, it’s considered a major flaw in the network as it stands today. The paper, entitled “Hijacking Routes in Payment Networks,” was published in mid-September.

Tochner and Zohar both hail from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while Schmid works at the University of Vienna.

“The attack allows for a disruption of payments on the lightning network,” said Zohar.

This is possible because each lightning network payment is passed across a network of nodes in order to reach its destination. If one of these middle nodes is a bad actor it can slow the payment down rather than swiftly pass along the payment as it’s supposed to.

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